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Don’t Talk About the Weather

earthtemperature.jpgThe New York Times reports that NASA headquarters ordered its scientists to keep their mouths shut about questions arising from the upcoming climate-change blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow" (with someone named Claude Laforce playing "UN Norwegian diplomat").

"No one from NASA is to do interviews or otherwise comment on anything having to do with" the film, said the April 1 message, which was sent by Goddard’s top press officer. "Any news media wanting to discuss science fiction vs. science fact about climate change will need to seek comment from individuals or organizations not associated with NASA."

The Times also reports that the space agency has called off the dogs and will now let its experts talk about climate stuff. Maybe that has something to do with some research results published last week on NASA’s own site, "Satellite Thermometers Show Earth Has a Fever." Keep it cute like that, so no one will get the idea that increased temperatures have anything to do with well, anything.

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View from the Ferry

FerrybuildingCaught the 6:25 ferry back to Oakland after work. Sitting on the top deck, noticed the sun was blocked behind  One Embarcadero Center (that tall building in the middle). Decided to try to shoot it with my camera phone, using my sunglasses as a filter. The building in the center-right with the flag on top is the Ferry Building; that little tiny nub to the far right is Coit Tower, I think. I’m surprised both at the ability to shoot anything with the phone and also at how modest the resolution really is.

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In the Mail

My medal for finishing the 2003 Paris-Brest-Paris randonee.
My medal for finishing the 2003 Paris-Brest-Paris randonee.
So, just about eight months to the day after I finished PBP, look what came in the mail. In reading the lore of the ride over the years, I’d seen reports of the medal, complete with your own individual
time on it. For some reason, I thought it might show up by the end of  last year. But it never came, and lots of other stuff came up, and I never really thought too much about it. I just figured that maybe I was the one rider who didn’t get one; or that my ride had been declared invalid for some unworthiness that the organizers had detected in me; or that I had managed to ride the one year when no medals were awarded. Just my luck.

Then I started to see accounts on some cycling email lists a month or so ago that none of the American riders had gotten their medals yet. But they were coming. By sea mail, maybe.

Yesterday, a big brown envelope with my self-addressed sticker was in the mailbox. Heavy. The medal was inside, along with my brevet card, with the stamps from all the controls along the way, and the English-language program for the event, with the finish times for all the participants, including No. 4417, Dan Brekke: 85H51.

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Resettling the Plains

Spotted a feature somewhere in the past couple of weeks about how some
Plains towns are offering homesteads to residents. It’s a twist on the
old homestead idea: Instead of 160 acres and five years to "prove out"
your claim  by farming it, you get something less than an acre in
town and need to build on it in a year or so. After seeing the National
Geographic article, I checked and found the story;
it was in the Washington Post. As an aside: What’s with the fascination
of the eastern papers — The New York Times has been running a series
of in-depth features on the depopulation of the Plains for at least a
couple of years — with the Plains?

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Great Plains

Cover story in the May National Geographic: ‘The Great Plains: Change
of Heartland.’ Focuses on the un-settlement of the Plains and the
(supposed) comeback of the buffalo and Native Americans. Yeah, at this
point you have to get the magazine for the full story, which is
beautifully shot. But the online tease for the story contains one stunning picture that’s representative of the powerful pictures in the magazine.

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My Current Data Crush

Wikipedia: "…an open-content encyclopedia in many languages. … started in January 2001 … 251,571 articles in the English version." For one of the features on our show, "TechLive," I check its daily almanac of historical events (here’s today’s). Pretty amazing what a bunch of smart volunteers can do.

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April Tornadoes

News of the tornado that hit Utica, Illinois, on Tuesday night made me think about the deadly twisters (see, I still have some newspaper guy in me) that hit northern Illinois on April 21, 1967. I remember the day because Mom picked me up at school and we had to get off the road when an extremely intense thunderstorm swept through; she pulled off Exchange Street into an abandoned farm yard in what is now a commercial area in University Park. It was only about 4 in the afternoon, but the sky was nearly black and it rained so hard for about five or ten minutes that you couldn’t see to drive. As it turned out, storms were sweeping the entire region.  At 4:30, a twister hit a high school in Belvedere, just outside Rockford, killed 24 and injured 400. About 45 minutes later, another tornado struck Oak Lawn and nearby suburbs, about 20 miles north of us, killing 33 and injuring 500.

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Austrian Housepainter

Living in a place that has its very own Austrian immigrant
fixing things for the Volk — I mean the people — I need to
acknowledge what I think every year on this date: that it’s Hitler’s
birthday. Der Fuehrer, 1889-1945. As the Franz Liebkind (crazy German
playwright) character says in "The Producers":

 

"Hitler! There was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in a single afternoon. Two coats!"

Of course, unlike most housepainters — OK,
any other housepainter I can think of, though I haven’t checked
Stalin’s or Genghis Khan’s resumes —  this one got a commotion
going that killed 50 or 60 or 70 million people.

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All the Poop That’s Fit to Report

In the quest to find out more about ShitBegone toilet paper — facts such as, is it real? — I happened upon this stunning source of excretory information: PoopReport.com.
Full of useful and fun facts and speculation,  such as a quick
user review of the Toto Drake toilet — it disposes of absolutely
anything, despite using just 1.6 gallons per flush; and a report on
whether terrorists might launch a strike on the United States by
spiking our toilet paper.

And oh, yes, there’s a nice little interview with the creator of ShitBegone, a Brooklyn lad named Jed Ela.

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[Generic] Toilet Paper

You can’t get much more basic than this: ShitBegone. Advertised as "100 percent recycled toilet paper," which might give your imagination some exercise. Ninety-six rolls for $44.99. Lovely — though I will quibble with how the name is rendered. "Shitbegone" follows "woebegone"; so it could be interpreted as "overcome by shit" — which would probably make it the perfect toilet paper for our times. If I were marketing director, or nitpicker in residence, I’d have fought for ShitBeGone.

By way of Boing Boing.